Forty Under 40

Christina Vernon Ayers, 36

Director of the Office for a Healthy Environment,
Cleveland Clinic

Ask Christina Vernon Ayers what makes her light up and you'll likely hear words such as recycling, waste reduction and worms.

It's not a typical response, but as the director of the Office for a Healthy Environment at the Cleveland Clinic, the 36-year-old architect is designing the hospital system to produce less waste, to use healthier products and to construct more environmentally friendly buildings.

Ms. Vernon Ayers created her office in spring 2007, soon after coming to the Clinic as a health care planner. Despite her short time as a Clinic employee, she was vocal about sustainability and green practices, so she proposed starting an office dedicated to a healthy environment. She also said she wanted to run it.

“I had approval in five minutes,” she said. “It was the right time, the right place and we had the right alchemy of institutional commitment, my own personal energy and passion.”

Her office has started a popular farmer's market at the Clinic, has prompted a 25% recycling rate on the main campus and has begun composting waste from the kitchens, among other programs. Under her direction, the Clinic also became the first American hospital to sign the UN Global Compact, which is a worldwide commitment to environmental and social responsibility, and was a founding member of the Global Health and Safety Initiative, which urges green health care.

That's no surprise to John D'Angelo, Clinic director of facility management. He said Ms. Vernon Ayers has an innate ability to convince people to listen to her ideas before making up their minds.

“She uses her passion to help reinforce her message,” he said.

But Ms. Vernon Ayers wasn't always so environmentally conscious. After obtaining her master's degree in architecture from Columbia University in 1998, she worked in New York designing corporate interiors.

“I was all the trappings of the modern hipster, Columbia architecture graduate,” she said.

Then, several weeks after finishing a painstaking project, she was told that her work was all for nothing because the building had been sold and the new owner wanted to redesign its interior.

“I realized I had gotten off course. What I'd been doing was not true to my core,” Ms. Vernon Ayers said. “I was doing stuff that was really wrapped up in a lot of vanity, and temporary, fleeting kinds of things.”

She then moved back to Cleveland and found in health care her true desire to design spaces that were important to people “that would allow doctors to do their jobs at peak performance.”

These days, Ms. Vernon Ayers' life is embroiled in sustainability, whether she's serving on boards such as the Green City Blue Lake coalition, tending to her composting worm bin or looking for ways to make her own home in Bay Village greener.